‘Where are all the Black people?’ The story behind Asheville’s loss of African Americans  • Asheville Watchdog

The first of four parts

Asheville’s Black population is disappearing faster than that of comparable cities in North Carolina, a trend that is accelerating and has transformed not only the makeup of the city but its cultural and institutional identity.

In 1980, one in five Asheville residents was Black. In 2024, it was one in 13, according to the most recent census data. 

The phenomenon is apparent not just to visitors and newcomers but to longtime Black Ashevillians who have witnessed the loss of businesses and community institutions and the exodus of young people to cities offering more opportunities.

“Black people have become almost obsolete in Asheville,” said James Grant, pastor of Worldwide Missionary Baptist Tabernacle Church in the historically Black neighborhood of Southside. “White people ask me, ‘Where are all the Black people?’ I say, ‘Hey, man, they’re either at work or they’re at home because they can’t afford to go anywhere, or they have moved out of the city because it’s not a place you can afford to live.’”

Asheville Watchdog mined U.S. Census Bureau data and interviewed more than two dozen Black leaders and current and former residents to examine the dramatic decline of Asheville’s Black community, its causes and its implications for the city.

Coming Oct. 26: The impact of urban renewal on Asheville’s historically Black neighborhoods

The roots of the drop run deep, going back decades to discriminatory policies from redlining that prevented Black people from obtaining home and business loans to Jim Crow-era hiring practices that stifled opportunity.

Urban renewal, a federally backed local initiative launched in the 1960s under the guise of ridding neighborhoods of blight, was vast in scope for a city of Asheville’s size. It displaced more than a thousand Black households and dozens of businesses such as groceries, barber shops and pharmacies that served as community hubs. It unraveled a network of Black professionals who served as mentors to younger generations.

There are modern-day causes, too.

The sky-high housing costs and the generally low-wage, service-based economy that challenge working people of all races are especially daunting to Black residents who, on average, earn slightly more than half as much as whites.

And as tourism mushroomed beginning around 2000 and Asheville became a magnet for wealthy white retirees, properties in once predominantly Black neighborhoods flipped to developers and investors. On one street in the historically formerly Black East End neighborhood, contemporary, three-level houses selling for nearly $1 million apiece and owned by white out-of-towners have replaced the century-old homes.

While Asheville’s population rapidly grew, the city’s Black population shrank, dipping to a 40-year low in 2020. // Watchdog graphic by Sally Kestin; source: IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census Bureau
The result: From 1980 to 2020, as Asheville’s population grew by 77 percent, the percentage of Black residents dwindled from 21 to 12 percent, according to census data from the University of Minnesota’s National Historical Geographic Information System (NGHIS). At the same time, the percentage of other races, particularly Hispanics, grew.

The Watchdog’s analysis includes people who identified as Black in combination with other races, an option introduced in the 2000 census. The percentage of Asheville’s population identifying as Black or African American alone is even lower – 10.5 percent in 2020 and 7.7 percent in 2024, census data show.

The decline is depriving the community as a whole of cultural and economic gains – draining it of talent, creativity and the chance to gain the empathy that grows as races live and work together, said Megan Underhill, chair of the sociology and anthropology department at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Asheville City Council member Sheneika Smith grew up in Southside and now lives in another historically Black community, Shiloh. When she and her teenage daughters walk into upscale downtown restaurants, all eyes turn to them, she said. “We sit down and I let (my daughters) order their food and they want to know, ‘Why do all these people look like this and where are the Black people?’” // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
“We’re losing the opportunity to create the community that so many (progressive) people purport to desire,” she said. “White people are losing, too.”

But the loss is far more profound and painful for Black residents, who are sometimes left feeling like strangers in their own hometown.

Sheneika Smith, 47, grew up in Southside and now lives in another historically Black community, Shiloh. She’s the executive director of a local nonprofit and has served on the Asheville City Council for eight years. 

When she and her teenage daughters walk into upscale downtown restaurants, all eyes turn to them, she said.

“You almost get that deer in the headlights” feeling, she said, as if the crowd of white diners is asking, “What are these urban individuals doing in this type of restaurant?

“We sit down and I let (my daughters) order their food and they want to know, ‘Why do all these people look like this and where are the Black people?’”

A steady population decline

Asheville’s Black population has steadily declined each decade. // Watchdog graphic by Sally Kestin; source: IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census Bureau
The decline in Asheville’s African American population is even more striking over time within historically Black neighborhoods and when compared with North Carolina’s similar-sized cities and the state. 

Census Tract Nine, which includes Southside, was home to 2,217 Black residents in 2000, 75 percent of its population. By 2023, the Black population had shrunk to 943, or 34 percent. Whites moved in, and the neighborhoods gentrified. In 2021, 27 homes in the tract were valued at more than $500,000 – all but one owned by white residents, according to NHGIS census data.

Black Asheville residents are not simply moving to more affordable communities in Buncombe, the data show. The Black population countywide declined from 8.6 percent in 1980 to to 6.8 percent in 2020.

But African Americans are moving to other parts of the state. Of the five cities closest to Asheville in size, Concord, Gastonia, High Point and Greenville all saw increases in their Black populations. Only Wilmington showed a significant drop, but Black people there still comprised a higher percentage of the population in 2020, 18 percent, compared with Asheville’s 12 percent, census data show. The state’s Black population remained unchanged at 22 percent.

Asheville’s Black population has steadily declined and is the lowest of comparable-sized cities in North Carolina. // Watchdog graphic by Sally Kestin; sources: IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census Bureau
Grant, the pastor of Southside’s Worldwide Missionary Baptist, said that during the 1970s, his father, Wesley Grant, led the church as it served as a vital community hub, with a full schedule of vacation Bible classes and other events, and a small fleet of buses for its nearly 300 members who needed transportation.

Church attendance has dropped all over the country, he said, blaming factors ranging from increased drug use and waning family discipline. But Worldwide Missionary, he said, has been especially hard hit because of the vanishing Black presence in the city.

Membership is now down to about 50 “on the rolls” but “if we get 20 to 25 on a Sunday, we’re doing all right,” he said. “We don’t even need a church van.”

Young people leave for better opportunities, higher wages

The loss of ambitious young Black people and its impact on Asheville’s culture and economy is especially concerning to leaders in the community, including Dwight Mullen, a former UNCA political science professor.

“I honestly don’t think I could name a dozen (Black) students who graduated in the last decade of my time at UNCA and stayed in Asheville as full-time professionals,” said Mullen, the former chair of the Buncombe-Asheville Community Reparations Commission, who retired from the university in 2018.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina Greensboro with a degree in fashion and business, Dallas Jackson moved to Chicago, where he is a team manager for the Gucci luxury fashion house. His college-bound friends from Asheville also moved to other cities to find educational and professional opportunities. // Photo provided by Dallas Jackson
Young African Americans are leaving Asheville to live and work in cities with more and better-paying job opportunities.

Dallas Jackson, 31, grew up in Shiloh. After graduating from the University of North Carolina Greensboro with a degree in fashion and business, he moved to Chicago, where he is a team manager for the Gucci luxury fashion house.

He loves and misses his hometown, he said, but “those opportunities aren’t in Asheville. There’s not stores like that in Asheville. The closest that we have is Charlotte.”

The jobs that do exist in Asheville do not pay nearly as much for Black residents on average. The annual income of Blacks was about half that of whites in 2023 –- $24,311 compared with $44,119, census data show.

And Jackson’s college-bound friends from Asheville, he said, followed the same path he did – out of town.

“They all left to continue their education, and then move on to their next portions of life where they wanted to go and get further experiences,” he said. “I think Asheville – it still doesn’t have that same full circle moment where you can live, work and stay there forever, as it used to.”

A long-running exodus

The economic migration of Black people to other cities began at least a half century ago as African American neighborhoods were dismantled by urban renewal and opportunities opened elsewhere.

Lamont Byrd – a nationally prominent expert on workplace safety – and his childhood friend from Southside, retired gastroenterologist John Holt Jr., left Asheville in the 1970s because, they said, the city offered them few prospects. 

Holt recalled his relief leaving Asheville for his freshman year at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“When I drove down Old Fort Mountain in my broken-down car full of stuff, I remember thinking to myself, you know, this is the only way I want to see this place – in the rear view mirror. I don’t plan on coming back,” said Holt, who, true to his word, settled and practiced in Raleigh.

Byrd’s parents, who owned the landmark Rabbit’s Motel soul food restaurant, still live in Southside. He and Holt own property in the county, and both have watched Asheville’s Black population and its culture wane. 

Byrd, like Holt, remembers the world of possibilities that opened when he left Asheville for East Carolina University. “I felt like I had this huge weight lifted off of me,” he said. “It’s like I’m about to do something.”

Childhood friends John Holt, left, and Lamont Byrd grew up in Southside. Holt, a retired gerontologist, lives in Raleigh; Byrd, a nationally prominent expert on workplace safety, lives in Washington, D.C. Both regularly return to Asheville but neither can imagine a future here for their children. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
Byrd, the former director of safety and health for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, built a specialized career possible only in a city like Washington.

After Holt graduated from medical school, Asheville began to develop as a regional healthcare hub, but he said he didn’t think he could have worked at Mission Hospital then, pointing wordlessly to the brown skin of his hand. And later, he said, he would have been hard-pressed to develop the diverse professional and patient network needed to start a large practice, as he did with several partners in Raleigh, where his wife had family and worked as a lawyer. 

Was there ever a chance he would move back to Asheville?

“No way,” he said. “Zero.”

The decline of the Black middle class

Older Black residents lived through a segregated Asheville in which they were separated from whites throughout public life, from housing to education to basic services. Holt recalls “white only” and “colored only” water fountains in downtown Asheville and a separate Black entrance at a theater leading to separate Black seating in the balcony.

Byrd, who moved to Asheville in 1967 from a “multi-cultural kind of neighborhood” in the Bronx, said he found it “mind-boggling” to enroll at the all-Black Livingston Street School in a school system still two years from full integration.

Anita White-Carter, 80, a retired librarian at UNCA’s Ramsey Library who grew up in Shiloh, vividly remembers riding a city bus as a child from the downtown Christmas parade, when she innocently took a seat next to a white man.

“He kicked me off the seat,” said White-Carter, who was forced to walk home with her teenaged brothers. “He put his foot up on the seat and pushed me off.”

As painful as segregation was, they say, it forced Black residents to create cohesive neighborhoods that offered a ready clientele for Black professionals and business owners and an abundance of role models for young people.

The historically Black neighborhoods of Burton Street, Hill Street/Stumptown, Southside and East End were affected by urban renewal and Interstate construction. // Map created by Asheville historian Emily Cadmus, used with permission
Holt and Byrd said the Southside of their youth was home to principals, teachers, construction workers, business owners, lawyers and doctors, including Holt’s father, a beloved family physician.

“They took interest in us, you know, and you could kind of look at them and see … where you wanted to be” as an adult, Byrd said.

Asheville had a thriving middle class that has gradually declined in the decades since, longtime residents say. The number of Black people in Asheville with college degrees and professional jobs has inched up over the years, but the racial gap remains stark.

For the five-year census period from 2019 to 2023, one-quarter of working Black adults reported that they held professional jobs – managerial, business, science or arts – compared with half of whites, according to NHGIS data.

More Asheville residents have college degrees than in 2000, but the increase among Black people is significantly less than whites. Note: Excludes multiracial people. // Watchdog graphic by Sally Kestin; source: IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census Bureau
And among adults 25 and older, 14 percent of Black residents had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 58 percent of whites.

Underhill, the sociologist, counted 16 Black faculty members in 2016 for a presentation she prepared that year on the value of diversity at the school. They now account for 10 of UNCA’s 197 faculty members, or about 5 percent, according to a university spokeswoman.

A dearth of Black culture

Many African Americans interviewed for this story say they yearn for more distinctly Black culture in Asheville. Byrd says the city’s breweries, restaurants and music venues widely appreciated by whites are “not for us.”

Black people have consistently earned less than whites in Asheville, and the gap has especially widened since 2010. Note: Excludes multiracial people // Watchdog graphic by Sally Kestin; source: IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System, U.S. Census Bureau
Though it might be ideal to live in a colorblind world, said Smith, the city council member, the reality is that Black people have a different shared experience than that of white people, and have created and consumed different art and entertainment in response.

This not only makes it harder for the city to retain Black residents, but represents a major missed tourism opportunity, said Smith, who attended college and worked in other North Carolina cities before returning to Asheville for personal reasons 14 years ago.

(Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority spokeswoman Ashley Greenstein said the TDA has invested in several initiatives to diversify tourism and cited a recent survey showing that 6 percent of Buncombe’s overnight visitors and 10 percent of its daytrippers identified as African American.)

African American visitors might flock to Asheville, Smith said, if it were as full of Black culture as it once was.

The Block, the city’s main former hub of Black commerce in the East End, was home not only to restaurants, barber shops, funeral parlors and groceries that faded in the wake of urban renewal; it housed nightclubs that, before World War II, hosted jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, according to the website of a neighborhood business group, The Block Collaborative.

In the 1970s, the original Orange Peel nightclub on Biltmore Avenue was a draw for high-profile acts including The Commodores, according to an oral history of the club that opened in 2002.

Smith grew up hearing about artists such as Little Richard and Marvin Gaye making stops in Asheville.

In this 1971 photo, residents are shown gathered outside Feldman’s Grocery on Eagle Street in The Block, a commercial district that served African Americans before urban renewal. // Photo credit: Andrea Clark Collection at Pack Memorial Public Library; photo by Andrea Clark
“My grandma used to talk about, like, the Chitlin Circuit,” she said, “and it came through the mountains.”

And now?

“Let’s go real practical,” she said. “What is a Black person to do? You know, what, where? Where are the soul food restaurants? Where is the soul after the bluegrass and beer? What is (there for) a person, whether they’re a Black visitor or a Black resident? What is our flavor? Where’s the flavor?”

High housing costs, low wages 

Asheville’s cost-of-living and longstanding racial inequities make it hard for Black entrepreneurs.

The median list price for a home in Asheville as of March was $595,000, according to a recent housing report commissioned by the Land of Sky Regional Council, and wages in the Asheville metropolitan area were 2.3 percent lower than the state average.

Add to that: Blacks in Asheville have disproportionately high arrest rates and significant gaps in school achievement, according to the 2024 Cease Harm Comprehensive Audit for the Community Reparations Commission. Home ownership for Black households in Asheville was 38 percent, compared with 70 percent for whites.

Unlike Dallas Jackson, who left Asheville, his sister, Kahlani, 33, said she feels obligated to stay and work to improve conditions for African Americans.

Kahlani Jackson applies lashes to Jayla Harvin at Asheville Pro-Lash and Salon, which she owns with her mother, Trina Gragg Jackson. She hopes her business serves as a model for young Black people. “You can’t be something you haven’t seen,” she said. “Sometimes, just planting a seed of growth in somebody is the reason that they create a business.” // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
She owns Asheville Pro-Lash and Salon on Hendersonville Road with her mother, Trina Gragg Jackson.

“Our salon is like a cultural hub,” she said. “If somebody comes in and they just got divorced or they’re having a hard time, I’m connecting them with social workers or a therapist in the area.”

She hopes her business serves as a model for young Black people. 

“You can’t be something you haven’t seen,” she said. “Sometimes, just planting a seed of growth in somebody is the reason that they create a business.”

But it’s a struggle, said Jackson, who in 2015 became the first Black woman to be crowned Miss Asheville. Like most other young Black people in Asheville, she said, she can only afford her preferred lifestyle with a second job, as a doula for Smith’s birthing nonprofit, Sistas Caring 4 Sistas.

High housing costs have forced Jackson to commute 50 minutes daily each way from Inman, South Carolina, where she lives with a family member in a large, lakeside house on .8 acres.

“My home would be astronomical” in Asheville, she said. “You pay a ton of money to live in a chicken coop.”

Home again, working to rebuild 

Asheville Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley, 55, left Asheville like so many others. But she returned and is working to rebuild Asheville’s Black professional community.

“I think folks might be surprised about how large the Black middle class is once you’re tapped in,” she said.

She asked to be interviewed in the lounge of the Foundry Hotel on South Market Street, she said, because it offers a view of what remains of the East End neighborhood where she grew up.

Asheville Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley left Asheville like so many others. But she returned and is working to rebuild Asheville’s Black professional community. When she started attending community gatherings of mostly white residents, she said, some were surprised to meet a successful Black attorney. “It was like I was a unicorn.” // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
It was safe enough that she remembers walking accompanied only by her dog, Prince, to get her hair done at a beauty parlor when she was eight. It was anchored by Nazareth First Missionary Baptist Church, which her father, prominent pastor and civil rights activist Charles Mosley, led for 43 years.

“I can look out the window and see the steeple,” she said.

Mosley left Asheville to attend UNC Chapel Hill, then law school at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She joined a large firm there that specialized in copyright law and helped represent members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s estate and worked with recording artists in the city’s burgeoning Black musical scene.

She returned to Asheville full time in 2016 to be close to her ailing father, who died in 2021.

Mosley, who now works remotely for a different Atlanta firm, joined a small Black legal community in Asheville that she said includes five other practicing lawyers and two judges. When she started attending community gatherings of mostly white residents, she said, some were surprised to meet a successful Black attorney. “It was like I was a unicorn.”

Holt and Byrd, who both left Asheville for good, recall a once thriving local chapter of the African American fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha Inc., a network of college-educated professionals that nurtured ambitious young people.

“The early ‘90s is when they took the charter away, ” Holt said. “There weren’t any young professionals coming back here.”

Mosley said there is now an effort to revive the chapter.

“I feel there are maybe 14 or 15 Alphas who are trying to reactivate,” she said.

To connect with more peers, Mosley reserves Wednesday evenings for get-togethers with Black friends, she said.

“I’ll send a text first thing in the morning saying … where we’re going to meet,” she said. “Sometimes it’ll be 35 or 40 people, sometimes it’ll be three of us.”

But she wishes that she didn’t have to make such an effort. She looks forward to the time when gatherings of Black professionals are natural and when she and her friends don’t feel obligated to talk about Asheville’s glaring inequities.

“I want Black excellence to be perceived as the norm,” she said. “Asheville is a beautiful city. I want it to be the nirvana for us that it is for everyone else.”

Asheville Watchdog welcomes thoughtful reader comments on this story, which has been republished on our Facebook page. Please submit your comments there.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Dan DeWitt is The Watchdog’s deputy managing editor/senior reporter. Email: ddewitt@avlwatchdog.org. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Email skestin@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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